Labels Limit Learning

James Nottingham

I recently had the pleasure of attending a conference where James Nottingham did a keynote session. James’s company has been awarded the exclusive licence to offer consultancy based on John Hattie’s Visible Learning throughout Scandinavia. Reflecting on the lessons from this work, James offers in this video some insights you can use at school, work or in your home environment. www.challenginglearning.com.

I really enjoyed his message about grading and how bad we all feel when we are at the low end of the scale. No matter how well we did compared to what we knew before we started learning the material. I think his example from his wine tasting course is great! From 0 – 76 % is a remarkable result, but when you are on the bottom of the list for your class you feel bad. Grades should be valued as an indicator of how well we are doing compared to what we knew prior to the task. We should measure our improvements and not use grades to compare ourselves to the other students in our class. In this talk he also explains how labelling students limits learning even if they do get a positive label!

Take a look at this 18 minute talk James had in Sweden. It is worth the time! ,